Quotessence
Home / Topics / Waitress Quotes

Waitress Quotes

Browse 174 quotes about Waitress.

Related topics

Waitress Quotes

“Grizzled white men poured drinks and dispensed dubious wisdom. Young white women in tight clothes delivered the food and the smiles and said "sorry" all the time. Short brown men cooked it all and cleaned it all up, and still managed to rise above the racial oppression of the United states to make kissing sounds at us waitresses whenever we were in the kitchen.”

“The Y Not had a waitress named Shirley who was the most disagreeable person I have ever met. Whatever you ordered, she would look at you as if you had asked to borrow her car to take her daughter to Tijuana for a filthy weekend. ‘You want what?’ she would say. ‘A pork tenderloin and onion rings,’ you would repeat apologetically. ‘Please, Shirley. If it’s not too much trouble. When you get a minute.’ Shirley would stare at you for up to five minutes, as if memorizing your features for the police report, then scrawl your order on a pad and shout out to the cook in that curious dopey lingo they always used in diners, ‘Two loose stools and a dead dog’s schlong,’ or whatever. In a Hollywood movie Shirley would have been played by Marjorie Main. She would have been gruff and bossy, but you would have seen in an instant that inside her ample bosom there beat a heart of pure gold. If you unexpectedly gave her a birthday present she would blush and say, ‘Aw, ya shouldana oughtana done it, ya big palooka.’ If you gave Shirley a birthday present she would just say, ‘What the fuck's this?' Shirley, alas, didn’t have a heart of gold.”

“Tiana balanced a stack of flapjacks, two bowls of grits, and five orders of pillowy-soft beignets on a serving tray. She squeezed through the narrow paths between the tables, carefully dodging pointy elbows and protruding feet. The café was packed to the gills with hungry, bleary-eyed customers who'd spent the night either kicking up their heels in the taverns or working the overnight shift in one of the factories in the French Quarter.”

“Sure. And you say hi to Dory, ‘k? C’mon Will – let’s get you to the Sheriff. I need a cold one.” “Yippee.” Said Will, not exactly brimming over with enthusiasm. Timaset Skooch reached across the table and packed the notes together. He counted them out too. Seven thousand credits! Then he scooped the coins and the (ugh) gold tooth into an empty glass for the waitress. Seven thousand credits! But what was the plastic slip under it all?”

“It was 42 degrees outside. It was hell on earth. Naturally, once we got inside the cafe, I immediately ordered a cold beer. The waitress had the kind of facial expression that said, “Kill me, please.” Which I liked for I could relate with it. What I didn’t like were waitresses that gave you that big old American bullshit smile, that fake smile. Fuck that; being a waitress sucks ass. Especially in the middle of nowhere for low pay. So why the fuck were they supposed to treat you like royalty?”

“I was a really good waitress. Waitressing takes a certain gusto. You need a good memory and an ability to connect with people fast. You have to learn how to treat the kitchen as well as you treat the customers. You have to figure out which crazy people to listen to and which crazy people to ignore. I loved waiting tables because when you cashed out at the end of the night your job was truly over. You wiped down your section and paid out your busboy and you knew your work was done.”

“Waitressing: [...] She was a very old soul, which meant that her life was driven by love and not ego. [...] She, on a soul level, had decided to commit a huge part of her life to serving people, to being kind and caring and wouldn't seek a lot of attention for it. The work was its own reward.”

“I hold doors open for people and tip twenty percent. I would never be rude or condescend to anyone in the service industry trying to support a family on minimum wage. I don’t like these bullies running around treating decent people like dispensable cogs. These guys take a waiter or a schoolteacher and stand on their necks until they’re nearly suffocated.”

“I like things to be orderly. For seven years I ate at Bob's Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee-with lots of sugar. And there's lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It's a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob's.”

“At first it was the incomes of corporations, then of rich citizens, then of well-provided widows and opulent workers, and finally the wealth of housemaids and the tips of waitresses. This is all in line with the ability to pay doctrine. The poor, simply because there are more of them, have more ability to pay than the rich.”

“...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.”

“We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.”

“I was at a restaurant, and I ordered a chicken sandwich, but I don't think the waitress understood me. She asked me, "How would you like your eggs?" I thought I would answer her anyway and said, "Incubated! And then raised, plucked, beheaded, cut up, put onto a grill, and then put onto a bun. Damn! I don't have that much time! Scrambled!"”